JERUSALEM—Specialists at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem began the groundbreaking process of digitally photographing the Dead Sea Scrolls this week, the New York Times reports. The group is photographing all of the thousands of fragments of the scrolls with plans to take the entire file and make it available on the Internet.

Using high-powered cameras that provide extremely high resolution and clarity and do not emit heat or ultraviolet rays, scientists have begun to uncover previously illegible sections of the scrolls in the process. Such discoveries could have significant scholarly impact.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea and contain the earliest known copies of all the books of the Hebrew bible (except for the Book of Esther), plus apocryphal texts and descriptions of the rituals of a Jewish sect around at the time of Jesus. The scrolls on parchment and papyrus are 2,000 years old, dating from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D., and were found mostly separated into tens of thousands of fragments that, combined, make up about 900 documents.

Access to the scrolls has been very limited, with scholars constantly asking the Israel Antiquities Authority for permission to see them. Pnina Shor, head of the conservation department of the authority, has said that while she welcomes the interest, every time a scroll is exposed to light, humidity, and heat, it deteriorates. Even without exposure, some of the ink as well as the residue from Scotch tape used by scholars in the 1950s cause deterioration.

In the 1950s, the collection was photographed in infrared. Those pictures are now stored in a climate-controlled room, because they show things already lost from the scrolls themselves. Scientists are planning to scan the old photographs as part of the current digitization project.

The experts, who are being led by Greg Bearman, a retired scientist from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, estimate that the process of photographing the scrolls will take one to two years, and it will be a while after that before everything will be available online.

"The project began as a conservation necessity," Shor said. "We realized then that we could make the entire set of pictures available online to everyone, meaning that anyone will be able to see the scrolls in the kind of detail that no one has until now."